About 60 truckloads of debris that could contain tinyfragments of bone or tissue were unearthed by construction crews that have been working on the new World Trade Center in recent years.
Thus the genome project would come to rely on new machines from lab equipment maker Applied Biosystems, which industrialized the process of counting these DNA letters, using tiny glass tubes that sorted DNA fragments by length.
These are tiny glass chips dotted with thousands of microscopic wells where DNA fragments react with other chemicals in order to measure the activity of genes or identify genetic variations.